First Evolved Shape, Hairball

The first shape has been grown using an evolved program! This is part of the plant grower project I am working on. It doesn't really look like much, but that's because it is evolved to grow as many nodes as possible in a set amount of time. So it is not surprising that it looks like a dense hairball. I suspect that results will get more visually interesting when the fitness criteria encourages compromise. Here is the shape:

The shape is really a representation of the 'phenotype.' A phenotype is 'the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment.' (according to google) The genotype is below:

Rather simple, and it is plausible that a human could create such a program. All this program does is take the mean vector between x and x's unit vector. X is the vector describing the position of a collided sphere-'nutrient' relative to the node that just 'fed.' What is interesting is that this program was evolved rather than written by a human (me). This evolution ran for five generations, where the population consisted of ten individuals. The evolution is being run using deap. As far as genetic programming goes this is a small population and not many generations to get an interesting result (usually defined in terms of 'fitness'). But I am just working out the errors first with a simple prototype. For reference this point in the project has been git tagged as

fist-evolved-shape

looks like I was too much in a rush to type 'first'! Not sure what fist-evolving is :)